A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

This appears to be East Side Historical Club, still meeting even after the boys had graduated from high school. If Munroe is right about the boys’ age, then these sessions would have occurred exactly at the time (1910) when Lovecraft was maintaining that he ‘shunned all human society’,²⁹ in particular his friends. Lovecraft, in fact, never lost touch with the Munroes, as a number of subsequent events will demonstrate; and Addison P. Munroe may well be right about both the nature and the date of these meetings. Lovecraft gives a picture of his literary production during this ‘empty’ period:

Chemical writing—plus a little historical and antiquarian research—filled my years of feebleness till about 1911, when I had a reaction toward literature. I then gave my prose style the greatest overhauling it has ever had; purging it at once of some vile journalese and some absurd Johnsonianism. Little by little I felt that I was forging the instrument I ought to have forged a decade ago—a decent style capable of expressing what I wished tosay. But I still wrote verse and persisted in the delusion that I was a poet.³⁰

The curious thing about this is that we have very few examples of his expository prose between ‘The Alchemist’ (1908) and the beginning of his astronomy column for the Providence Evening News on 1 January 1914. What we do have are a series of poems presumably written ‘about 1911’ or sometime thereafter. Few of these are at all distinguished, but one is of consuming biographical interest: ‘The Members of the Men’s Club of the First Universalist Church of Providence, R.I., to Its President, About to Leave for Florida on Account of His Health’.

There is no clear way of dating this poem, and it may have been written as early as 1910 or as late as 1914; but what is remarkable about it is its mere existence, indicating that Lovecraft was a member of this men’s club. The First Universalist Society, established in Providence since 1821, had a new church built in 1872 at the corner of Greene and Washington Streets, near the Providence Public Library; and this must have been where Lovecraft went when he participated in the men’s club. I can only sense the hand of Lovecraft’s mother in this entire enterprise: having failed on at least two occasions to inculcate standard Sunday school training in him as a boy, she perhaps felt that a less rigidly doctrinal church would be more to his liking. Actually, in all likelihood it was a means of preventing Lovecraft from becoming wholly withdrawn from society—in effect, of getting him out of the house every now and then.

The other poems written around this time similarly concern themselves with local affairs, and unfortunately their one clear thematic link is racism. ‘Providence in 2000 A.D.’ is Lovecraft’s first published poem, appearing in the Evening Bulletin for 4 March 1912. It is actually quite funny, although much of the humour would not be very well received today. The parenthetical prose paragraph that prefaces the poem—’(It is announced in the Providence Journal that the Italians desire to alter the name of Atwell’s Avenue to “Columbus Avenue”)’—tells the whole story: Lovecraft ridicules the idea that the Italians of the Federal Hill area have any right to change the Yankee-bestowed name of the principal thoroughfare of their own district. (The street was never renamed.) The satire tells of an Englishman who, in the year 2000, returns to Rhode Island, the land of his forebears, and finds everything foreignized. The fact that the Evening Bulletin published this poem must mean that others aside from Lovecraft found it funny.

Other poems of this period are much nastier, but were not published at the time. ‘New-England Fallen’ (April 1912) is a wretched 152-line spasm speaking of some mythical time when hard-working, pious Anglo-Saxon yeomen established the dominant culture of New England only to have ‘foreign boors’ infiltrate the society and corrupt it from within:

The village rings with ribald foreign cries;

Around the wine-shops loaf with bleary eyes A vicious crew, that mock the name of ‘man’, Yet dare to call themselves ‘American’.

This is surely close to the nadir of Lovecraft’s poetic output—not only for the ignorant racism involved, but for its array of trite, hackneyed imagery and nauseating sentimentality in depicting the blissful life of the stolid yeoman farmer. Perhaps only the notorious ‘On the Creation of Niggers’ (1912) exceeds this specimen in vileness. Here is the entire poem:

When, long ago, the Gods created Earth,

In Jove’s fair image Man was shap’d at birth. The beasts for lesser parts were next design’d; Yet were they too remote from humankind.

To fill this gap, and join the rest to man,

Th’ Olympian host conceiv’d a clever plan.

A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure, Fill’d it with vice, and call’d the thing a NIGGER.